In the last day or so, the normally bright skies of Minecraft have been darkened by arguing, fear and talk of the EULA for Minecraft being changed to restrict players and server hosts making money out of the game beyond donations.

Some of the folk behind the private custom servers who sell services and other things like perks are in an uproar, as they say they will be unable to continue maintaining the worlds they’ve created.

What’s changed to cause the debacle? Well, nothing. But change might be coming.

Mojang’s current EULA was drawn up in December, 2013. The one major rule outlined in the EULA is that people cannot make money from anything Mojang has made. That seems reasonable, but a lot of the things being sold in custom servers have nothing to do with Mojang. They are things like titles and plugins not developed by the studio.

The EULA does expand this “major rule”, but it continues to be vague. “By ‘distribute anything we‘ve made’ what we mean is ‘give copies of the game away, make commercial use of, try to make money from, or let other people get access to our game and its parts in a way that is unfair or unreasonable’.” What is unfair or unreasonable?

There is not an explicit rule that states nobody can make money from anything in Minecraft. Which is where most of the confusion has stemmed from, since Mojang appears to be acting under the impression that this rule has always existed.

Mojang’s Erik Broes seems to be the point of origin for the new EULA discussion. A Reddit post displays a chatlog where Broes says it doesn't matter if it's based on plugins, "you cannot make money with Minecraft without our permission". This is not clear from the current EULA. “[I]f you are on a server, your experience should be the same as every other player,” he continued. “[W]e just do not want people to mix the pools of 'paying people' and 'nonpaying people'.”

Broes mentions that the developers discussed the situation, with the end result potentially being a change to the EULA. That would certainly need to happen, as the current version does not make this remotely clear.

There is only one way where you can get money in Minecraft, both Broes and Notch - who chimed in on Twitter - explain. Server hosts may accept donations to fund the running of said servers, but these donations must come with no strings attached. Donors cannot receive gifts or perks, because then it becomes a sale.

Have any of you lot paid for perks or other things in a Minecraft server? Would the removal of such a feature put you off continuing to play? And if you run a server yourself, what do you make of the potential changes? Let us know in the comments, chums.

this is outraging! ive paid over 200 in minecraft and for that to 200 bucks to be taken away from me will make me quit Minecraft and my friends will too and the youtubers i like to watch said the might have to go to paid subscription because the cant keep the server up and running because people cant pay money for ranks! thanks a lot for ruining minecraft and u still make millions of dollars anyway so i dont see y u r doing this :(

This is such a stupid idea, Mojang has been/is going downhill so quick since 2014. Its like they no longer even care popularity of the game anymore. Speaking of 2014 hello ignorant people its 2014 microtransactions are a part of many games and a lot of people arent so stubborn that they dont welcome them.

As a player, this change sucks because now I lose all my standings (ranks) in my favorite servers. Not only that but all of the servers I chose for the vastness of donation options are null now. Every server is going to be like the same server with different people and a different map now, donations options variety is what made servers stand out to a lot of people.

I do agree to some small degree though, although I am a gamer who does not mind microtransactions as an option (lets be honest nobody HAS to donate, it is a choice and almost never a necessity) I do see the point on the matter of "pay to win". While I dont mind pay to win at all, seeing all these servers with only pay to win options with no circumstance where you can do something skillfully and gain something big that would rival say a donation rank. As a player this dulls out the game a little, instead of enforcing this it may have been a better idea to go around and enforce skill to win types of rewards to be added in, the option that would take more work and be better for the community would never be the option picked by a company like Microso ... I mean Mojang.

As a server owner, obviously this change sucks even more. I run a small server that me and a few friends have spent the last year building (started last August). We are about to open and right before we open we have to put it on hold to rework the entire donation store for this. We had some really cool options and great perks for anyone who donated any amount. The perks got better the more you donated but there were still fantastic perks in there for just spending $1. Not only that but this change makes it nearly impossible for a small server such as this to get bigger. With this change the server is lucky to make enough for it to run, let alone to upgrade itself or expand into a multiworld hub. We had also started to include skill for perk options as well because we are only trying to make money for server things (upgrades and expansions) while keeping nothing ourselves.

This change is going to kill little servers, its hard enough to run a good server tack on now that in order to run one a person has to get a separate job just to pay server bills. The only way to make money now is to ask them to pay to enter, which I myself would never do so how could I expect other people to, and do crap little things like advertisements and sell hats and pets (that nobody is going to buy).

So really, how good is this change? There are a lot of people who are out there backing it without knowing the serious and devastating effect it is having on thousands of servers with hundreds of thousands of players (Hypixel is one server that gets 10000 people daily). People who cant handle the fact that there are options for people to buy there way to the stop, instead of criticizing the fact that there ARE those types of options they should spend more time and energy angry at the fact that there ARENT other types of options for everyone. People with money buy there way to the top, people with skill own there way to the top and generally end up on top of the people with money, and people like me who only has low money and a lot of skill should be excited about this as a player. In reality though the options you pay for are exactly that something you CHOOSE to pay for, if a server charges too much move to a better one with lower prices (dont pick the first one you see because it has lower prices, do some research).

My server for example, the highest priced option was $75 (about $5 more than the monthly bill cost). It wasnt a necessity to buy you could play the entire map without it, but it came with perks from items to commands to houses. There is also a rank for defeating the first cities leader that gives out items and commands and only that, defeating each city would advance the rank. The option of donation had different items and commands and that option is necessary to keep the server running, there were 4 more ranks going down to $5 but the way it was setup was so that everyone who played had a different experience.

Another good example is training, donators would have had the ability to start training wherever using a special setup and skillers that win their way up would have special training rooms built by us with the best monsters for each skill available to them. Difference? The donators have instant access but they have remember what to train on and pick it themselves while skillers would be able to teleport to the rooms with the best setup possible for each skill.

All this change says is that they are looking to hinder money, it seems like they just dont want people to make money off of their game. They pretend like they care about things like "all the support tickets from parents who's children got their credit cards and bought a $1000 iron golem" but they really dont, what they really care about is that people are getting paid 6-7 figures per year off of the servers. When there are people who are just here to try and make a big awesome server that now cant unless they work a job solely to pay Minecraft server bills.

I know its a long story but this is the truth about this and people who back it are complete morons, especially when they back their reasoning with ignorant comments like "I already paid for Minecraft why do I have to pay for (insert donation option here) on (insert server here)".

Thank you kindly to all of those people who are smart enough to put some thought into this, the people pick apart the stupidity of Mojang's ideas (like this one).

Also a big thank you to Mojang for F#%*ing the community like always, just like any other big game/big company.

This is truly one of the most dumb things Mojang has done. Mojang has dared to hurt the community once again, shutdown servers, and hurt the Minecrafters even more. My servers give to charities to make our world a better place, for donating to a charity, we give them a 'donator' rank. The donator rank allows them to do somet things extra, and have some kits. When someone gets donator on my server, it's to reward them for donating to a charity.

Also, what about staff? They say they want the same experience for everyone, when server administrators and moderators can spawn items, teleport, etc. Mojang's logic in this doesn't make sense what so ever. If someone is scammed when buying say donator, or extra perks then that issue can be taken legally. Mojang has no good reason to be doing this, they are just hurting the Minecraft community once again. Mojang has been going downhill for a while now, starting with Jeb_ running Mojang, and Notch stepping down. Minecraft has become more 'locked down'. I personally think this is to get more players to use the 'Minecraft Realms' thing they added. Which is basically a hosted vanilla server by Mojang...

People paying for crap in games(even on minecraft servers) is very common. I don't see how Mojang can deal with that. Unless of course people report these servers. They'll just add a new server with a new name.

“[I]f you are on a server, your experience should be the same as every other player,”

How does this affect servers with mods? Surely that is a huge grey area. This doesn't seem well explained at all to me. I also don't see how it's enforceable.

How does this affect servers that blacklist/whitelist blocks or areas then?

What about servers that run mods that change world generation? If I run a server that has custom world generation and I chose not to generate any coal but I accept donations, what happens then? Is this okay with them, or not? It affects gameplay, and I'm accepting donations, but the two aren't linked.

Either I'm missing something, or they really need to explain what the deal is. Glad I'm no longer involved with minecraft in any major way.

This is BAD news! You guys are looking at this through a very narrow window. What about people who have already bought things in servers? What about sold pluggins? What about people like Hypixel who make there money off of their server? If this goes down you can say goodbye to that server and many others.

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